Thursday, July 15, 2010

How Social Media Can Help Journalists Reach Ethnically Diverse Groups

The Pew Research Center released a report last week that confirms what Cristina Fernández-Pereda of El País and Natalie Hopkinson of The Root have known all along: Latinos and blacks lead all other racial and ethnic groups when it comes to texting and Twitter.

Remember the digital divide, the gap between whites and minorities due to the high cost of broadband? Smart phones have allowed younger, lower-income users -- many of them African-Americans and Latinos -- to skip the traditional Internet infrastructure and get online without broadband or even a laptop.

Fernández-Pereda, who blogs about Latinos in the United States for the Spanish newspaper Soitu Es, has covered social media and media technology for a couple of years. Recently, she wrote about Latinos' use of the Internet, saying it's "a community that is forcefully pushing its way onto the Internet."